


Seeds and Shotgun Shells

by ZoeBug



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: And lots of nature metaphors, Angst, Background Character Death, Canon Era, Growing up during a war, I mean it's me writing canon era - are you even surprised anymore?, Introspection, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 20:31:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6439405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco looks at Jean―his face flushed and still, beautifully, breathless―and thinks Jean is far more like a sprout than a shotgun shell.<br/><br/>He thinks maybe he might be too.<br/><br/>He thinks maybe none of them were ever bullets in the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeds and Shotgun Shells

**Author's Note:**

> I was half asleep and the concept came to me and this happened. It was nature metaphors and angst/futility and canon era... LISTEN, OK? I'm just really weak.

The first time Marco learns to pack a shotgun shell, it's late summer.

Like spritely ghosts hovering around their ankles, the translucence of dandelion seeds dot the grass around the tables set up for the cadets. It's hot outside that day and Marco has his jacket off, tossed to the ground beneath the table, and his shirt unbuttoned.

Beside him Jean's nose is running, as it has been since the tiny white floaters first began emerging from the yellow blanket of dandelion blossoms. He sneezes and Marco mutters " _bless you_ " through a laugh and Jean glares while groaning and pressing his fingertips to the sinus pressure gathering under his eyes.

Marco turns back to the table in front of him, the residual smile still having yet to leave his lips, and packs shot into the casing. He finishes a moment later and holds up the capsule, the last of his smile fading as he realizes the amount of power he's holding between his index finger and thumb―at the staggering amount of potential packed into something so small.

Beside him, Jean sneezes again and Marco almost drops his shell in surprise. He looks sideways to see Jean staggering backwards from the force, a puff of dandelion seeds exploding beside his friend's foot where he knocks them free of their stem.

Smiling, Marco mutters " _bless you_ " once more, watching the seeds disperse like shot spraying from a shell.

And it's then that Marco begins to consider the similarities between the two.

 

 

 

The first time Marco opens a forbidden book, he doesn't realize that's what it is.

He finds it knocked off Armin's nightstand one afternoon in early spring when the snow has turned the training ground's landscape to a muddy bog. Marco knows how much Armin prizes his books so he'd hate for someone to track mud all over it.

But when he picks it up, the leather spine falls open with the softest of crackling to a page full of beautiful illustrations of flowers. The roots wind in spindly lines below their stems like branching veins and Marco finds himself spellbound. These are plants he's never seen, patterns of leaves and petals he didn't know flowers could grow themselves into and he is awestruck.

Armin startles Marco when he enters the barracks suddenly, staring at Marco and flushed with embarrassment and fear. But Marco just hands the book back to him and asks him where those beautiful flowers grow, since he can't read the language scrawled beside each of the intricate illustrations.

Armin doesn't look up from the page, his bangs falling in his eyes, when he tells Marco they don't anymore. That they're all long dead. That they only exist as drawings in books like these.

Marco doesn't understand how things can just _not_ grow anymore. Armin says they did grow. Just not fast enough to replace the ones that got eaten.

Armin thanks Marco for not telling anyone about the book and Marco thanks Armin for letting him look at them.

That night Marco lays in his bunk and thinks about the way color would have drained from long ago hills, maybe like the way people go pale with blood loss. Thinks about how the blossoms would have gone first―the reds and oranges and yellows of bursting petals―before even the green of the young chutes would have disappeared between gnashing rows of teeth.

The frame of his bunk creaks as he shifts to look over the edge of his mattress at Armin down the row, snoring lightly. Looks at Eren with his mouth hanging open and one leg thrown haphazardly off the edge of his bed. Looks down to the bunk below him at Jean―almost unrecognizable in sleep with his brow not furrowed.

Wonders how long it will be until the enlistment age falls from twelve to eleven. To ten. To nine.

Wonders if people, too, are like the flowers in Armin's books―if everyone he's ever known or met or even heard of believed they, too, would be the lucky ones.

 

 

 

The first time Marco watches someone die from a gunshot, it's winter.

Jean's nose is red again but it's the chill pulling the color to the surface of his skin this time. He's standing beside Marco, sniffing thickly, boots crunching quietly as he shuffles his feet in the snow.

From this distance, back by the barracks, Marco can only see the deserter from the waist up―the rest of his form blocked by the half circle of firing squad arcing before him.

There is no sound from the other cadets, silently gathered and watching from their distance. Marco hears only the nervous movement of Jean's feet and then the barked orders of the firing squad.

Blindfolded and shivering, Marco can't see if the soldier is crying or not. He stands stock upright, his head tilted upwards toward the clear bright winter's sun.

There is a shout of " _Fire!_ " and a deafening crack and in that moment Marco thinks wildly of fragile crocus chutes bursting bravely through the snow of early spring.

And the soldier staggers for a moment, swaying like a sapling in the breeze as pricks of red begin to dot the fabric of his shirt like the fields of poppies Marco grew up sprinting through with his siblings as a child...

And then he falls. And it is not beautiful or graceful like the way petals float from flowers. It is jolting and heavy and he disappears from sight as he topples to the snow faster than Marco can think-

And it's over.

Marco can no longer see him beyond the circle of the firing squad and he thinks Jean murmurs " _let's go inside_ " beside him but his ears are ringing so he can't be sure.

 

 

 

The first time Marco kisses someone, he can't really put his finger on whether it's spring or summer.

It's that in-between stage of seasons where he knows what the calendar says, but nature is acting a bit more ambiguous in its ways of being―as Marco comes to understand it does.

The greens are more vibrant than they were a few weeks ago. And more shades of colored petals have begun adding themselves to the spectrum spread across the forest floor that rushes beneath his feet as he runs, breathless and laughing between the trees.

His way along is awkward and stumbling as Jean's got him by the wrist, tugging him behind him, so he can't run properly or ever seem to gain proper balance. It gives the entire excursion a sort of off-kilter tilt of excitement―like jumping off high rocks into water, or like a dizzying arc in 3DMG when you fire on instincts alone faster than thought can form.

Jean calls back for him to keep up, but the words bubble through gruff laughter and the smile stretching his lips and Marco can hear Jean is just as breathless as him.

Marco thinks maybe this is what youth is supposed to feel like.

Like breathless laughter and welcome vertigo and spring fading into summer so gradually you can't label the days one way or another. Maybe this is what he might have gotten, what Jean might have gotten, what they _all_ might have gotten if they'd been born somewhere else, some _when_ else.

He's dizzy, suddenly, with more than the tilting and the laughter, but with the staggering realization of how much war has taken from them for this moment to be something special, a delicacy of experience, rather than a staple of youthful summers.

He imagines, for a moment, what it would be like in that other, distant life. If he and Jean were running through this forest in their own clothes rather than military uniforms. If the smile Jean throws back at him when he turns didn't look so tired beneath it all. If they had all the time in the world on this ambiguous seasonal day to be... something ambiguous themselves.

Maybe they wouldn't be running, Marco muses, in this far-off possibility. Maybe running wouldn't always be their first instinct―running or rushing or shouting, it would all be one of a thousand options to choose. Maybe they would be walking. Leisurely.

 _Leisurely_. Marco thinks the word and it feels like something one remembers of a dream after waking.

Marco stops abruptly, and the tug on Jean's arm jolts him and he turns, again, laughing, smiling, his chest heaving. He asks what's wrong and Marco doesn't know where to start.

He doesn't know whether to tell Jean of all they've been robbed of―so much that it took him this long to even notice its absence. He doesn't know whether to tell Jean that fifteen year olds shouldn't know how to fire military weapons or have the darkness of death hanging above their beds as they sleep.

He doesn't know whether or not he should tell Jean about that half-imagined other world where they were walking instead of running―walking _leisurely―_ along together as something other than fellow soldiers, as something they had the peace and the time to leave ambiguous.

So he doesn't. He just smiles at Jean where he stands, still catching his breath in the dappled light filtering through the leaves. He smiles and grabs the lapels of Jean's uniform―imagines them, for a moment to be the rough material of civilian clothes, to belong to a life where they have this luxury of ambiguity and slowness―and leans in to kiss him.

When Marco was young he used to help his mother tend to the plants in the garden behind his house. Planting seeds and watering vegetables and picking off bugs that gnawed at the leaves―these were always jobs for the younger ones. When he grew tall enough, strong enough, he was moved on to other things. Tilling and weeding and carting wheel-barrels full of compost―those became his jobs when age and strength pushed him away from the tenderness and fragility of it.

But still, he remembers. He remembers what it was like to be small and to have the job of carefully tending to growth so closely and so directly.

And that moment in the forest, with Jean breathing harshly through his nose against Marco's cheek, with his hands coming up to slide into Marco's hair, he feels it again. Like he is watching delicate seedlings pushing through ground. Like he is understanding the staggering amount of potential that can come from something of such minuscule beginnings.

Because kissing Jean is like that―feels like gardening with his mother back home because Jean smells like earth and fresh grass and tomatoes in direct sunlight. Like fragility and tenderness. And it has Marco muttering " _I'm sorry_ " into Jean's lips because of all the world has stolen from them―youth and freedom from fear and their right to a peaceful life and even the purity of a first kiss―but Jean just shakes his head and kisses him again.

And Marco wonders, between noticing the warmth of Jean's skin and the softness of his hair, how long this tiny seedling between them has before something large and hungry comes along and crushes it between gnashing teeth.

 

 

 

It's the kiss, in the end, that makes Marco realize that the difference between seeds and shotgun shells is the ease with which they affect the world around them―the speeds with which they change the places where they bloom. Marco comes to realize, while kissing Jean, how much faster destruction blooms than creation.

Because it takes a lifetime's worth of seconds for something to grow into what it becomes. And yet death blooms in something so swiftly that it is there in the single second after.

Marco looks at Jean―his face flushed and still, beautifully, breathless―and thinks Jean is far more like a sprout than a shotgun shell.

He thinks maybe he might be too.

He thinks maybe none of them were ever bullets in the beginning, that they were all born to be gradual and unassuming and near silent in their growing; to be reaching continuously upwards to the light.

But maybe it's nearly impossible to not become a bullet if that's all that you've been shown. If all you've been taught has been fear and steel and explosive bursts flying from rapid collisions. Maybe that's what life has become here behind the Walls: burning and unyielding and over so fast that all you hear of its passing is a deafening crack.

Marco sees it in Eren's eyes when he uses the word " _destroy_." He sees it Mikasa's when she uses the word " _protect_." He sees it in Bertholdt's silences and Reiner's too-wide smiles. He sees...

He sees gunpowder in the blackness of his friends' pupils when they greet him each morning and when he thinks about it Marco can't remember the last time his ears weren't ringing.

He begins looking at his hands wondering what he himself is growing into; he tries to spend less time looking at the world as if seeing it down the barrel of a gun and more time with his head tilted upwards.

Marco thinks that to align yourself with the seeds is to resign yourself to patience, to incrimentality, to quiet progress.

But death follows bullets far more swiftly than life follows seeds and growing comes so, _so_ slowly.

And, God, it's hard to allow yourself to grow slowly when the world is full of gunfire. And Marco thinks maybe that will be the death of him someday. He wonders if someday he'll live only in spindly illustrations in forgotten books for strangers to gaze upon with wonder and melancholy.

Perhaps no matter what he chooses, that's his fate either way. Perhaps it's everyone's fate either way.

Because maybe he―and everyone he knows or has met or even ever heard of―live in a world of shotgun shells and grow far too slowly for any of it to make a difference.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos always appreciated!  
>   
> [fanfic/podfic blog](http://zoe-bug.tumblr.com/) | [personal](http://xiexiecaptain.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/xiexiecaptain)


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